Philosophical Inquiry

This paper seeks to defend the Aristotelian idea that the concern of ethics is health of the soul; and that this consists in reasonableness/virtue.

Nihilism poses grave problems for those who seek directives to lead their lives. In this article, the three most important ways to deal with nihilism are inquired, with an emphasis on their credibility. Both nihilism from a metaphysical perspective and the emphasis on pleasure from nihilistic considerations are given attention. The acceptance of nihilism can have far-reaching consequences, which are evaluated at various points. Nietzsche's approach must also be considered. He accepts what he calls a sort of nihilism, but as a means to 'new' values. This alternative to nihilism is examined no less critically than the other two stances.

While contemporary epistemologists consider Cartesian scepticism as a menacing problematic, it seems that Plato scarcely had any Cartesian doubts about knowledge of the extemal world. In this paper I ask why Plato had this cavalier attitude towards Cartesian scepticism. A quick first explanation is that Plato never conceived the challenge of Cartesian scepticism or at least, if he did, he missed the potential threat to empirical knowledge that such a challenge poses. I argue against this explanation and offer an altemative, more plausible explanation.Very briefly, I claim that Plato grasped both the logical possibility of Cartesian scepticism and its potential threat but remained impervious because of his ontological epistemology. For Plato, the empirical world can hardly be an object of knowledge, just like a dream can hardly be an object of knowledge. But for Plato this is not really worrying because, necessarily, forms must exist and these constitute the truly real world and the tme object of knowledge. What is deeply worrying for Plato is that most people do not realize the 'dreaming' condition of the empirical world and need to be 'waken up' to the intelligible world of the forms by the philosophers-kings.